PC Tech Thread

Oooh. Ta. Will have a poke around....

They've got a 12% discount at the moment, and if you can get the 15% student discount then that mostly wipes out the VAT (i.e. they advertise it ex-VAT, but *1.2 0.85 only works out at 1.02)

If you don't need the latest and greatest then I got a 'scratch and dent' Inspiron 13 7373 earlier this year for about £600. 256GB SSD, very punchy current gen i5 and 8GB RAM. The fancy XPS' would be a bit quicker, but for almost everything I reckon you wouldn't notice.

Took me a few minutes to find where the scratch was. It was a superficial mark on the underside of the laptop, about 8mm long.

Oh, and while I'm waxing about Dell Outlet, I also got a 'scratch and dent' Alienware Aurora R7 in March.

i7-8700K
11GB 1080Ti
16GB RAM
256GB M2 SSD
water cooled

for £1270

This was around the time that the 1080GT was going for about £850 by itself

So definitely worth keeping an eye out. Some of the pricing can be very keen.

They had another one with Dual 1080Ti's, 512GB SSD and 32GB RAM for £2k
Hugely overkill but I don't think you could have bought the parts for that price.

Under a grand for a really fast laptop https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops-notebooks-and-2-in-1-laptops/new-dell-g5-15/spd/g-series-15-5587-laptop/cn55804 (even faster than that XPS 15, although nowhere near as nice looking).

Can add another stick of 16GB RAM and for £1,100 you've got pretty much the fastest mobile processor (outside of specialist ones) and 32GB of RAM.

Downside is obviously it's a bit chunky.

Thanks all for the incredibly helpful responses. Cheers.

#loveforthehivemind

Dont want to jinx it but.... SANITY CHECK!!!

Plug ins being loaded...

4 3TB HDDs with 16g RAM.

So update and some questions.

I have now got an operational Proliant G7 running 16g RAM and FreeNas. Not joking, i have managed to get it up and running. As its FreeNAS-11.2-BETA3 theres no reference material from Master Yodatube
i am struggling to RAID my 4 drives (for some reason, its recognising my 2 mirrored OS flash drives but not the 2x3Tb drives). Well, it recognises them in the Disk section, but not as an option for pooling (and therefore raiding)

Ive even managed to connect it to both the router and to the interwebz.

I want to get the Plex plugin but it says i need to pool the drives.

So... Im smashing my head against the keyboard. the 2 harddrives arent being recognised as they have no volumes. I cannot seem to find out how to undo it.

First question. Why u not raid5 or better yet, ZFS all the things?

fuck it... sorted it out myself. Full of 0s!!

Jesus it takes a long time

You can pick RX 580's up for around that when on offer and they outperform 1060's.

https://pricespy.co.uk/computers-accessories/computer-components/graphics-cards/pci-express/radeon-rx-580--cv2815

Sounds like the 4GB model would do you even, although I hear there is a refresh this month so that will effect prices in your favour.

Would strongly suggest not using the Beta build, they really do put some weird stuff in there.

I've somehow fuck shit up. Formating my drives made them disappear. Which then lead to a crash when rebooted that lead to a BSOD....

Reformat and reinstall. BSOD

Thinking boot up disk was corrupted, re downloaded, and iso created. Reinstalled system.

BSOD .

Changed to 11.1 (not beta).

BSOD

How are you trying to set up your drives?
What are you using for a boot drive? Best to have a completely separate boot drive, don't try to boot from the ZFS array or things will be spicy. I told you there's an internal USB port specifically for booting off a USB drive? The drive speed is irrelevant, it holds everything else in memory/SWAP. ~64GB quality drive would be fine.

I'm using 2 USB flash drives as mirrored boot drive. And 4 3tb disks that I want to run in RAID5 or better yet 10.but until it sees the disks, this isn't possible.

When formating, is it best to use NTFS or FAT32 (I know later it will be changed TO ZFS) but in the mean time?

I would have thought you don't need to format them at all, leave the space unallocated.
Also, better to sort the ZFS voodoo out now, otherwise you have the hassle of moving stuff around later. This is useful.

Managed to get it up and running but its because i swapped to new USB3 instead of the original 2.0

Now needs to learn how to set up cloud drives and set the NAS.

Cheers, I've looked at that, but being a complete beginner I haven't a clue!
Probably gonna either upgrade what I have, or just build a complete new one, I'm not really sure yet.

I'd go new build, everything moved on quite a bit since your last. If you just want something simple and cheap the latest i3 chips are great and if you are only gaming in 1080 (and casually) you could spend less on a GPU and grab a 1050ti. I'm no expert but happy to help.

What price range do I need to be at to get 60+fps in pubg on a resolution that isn't potato x potato.

Have some big invoices due and feel a treat is in order. Nothing daft but whenever I go on partspicker or whatever I, by default, add the most expensive and gratuitous components and something tells me that's not the way to build a computer. I end up with some 14 grand monster. Would 2 or 3k do me nicely? I'd settle for less obvs given upgrade opportunities but would want it to work very nicely out of the box.

I thought you already had some super powerful PC?

I would put together a parts list but it would end up being this:
https://www.novatech.co.uk/pc/range/novatechelite127.html

.

2K jesus christ!!!

That seems a lot of money, but then again I've generally just ended up buying more and more bits as the years go by for my PC.

Just do what I have done and grab an eGPU? Laptop for looking all hot and professional in meetings/starbucks then plug in the nerd station at home and game away. Make sure you have good headphones.

(I'm running a 1070 and get 60fps @1440 on high settings paired with my 13inch MBP, so any desktop CPU will beat that).